Page 4 of Demon Heart: The Complete Series

I arrived at Buckingham Palace just before midnight, a car sent to pick me up.

An encampment of tents and barrel fires sat outside the gates, a peaceful protest group in favor of demon integration spreading down The Mall.

I was always surprised to see it, considering the queen’s distaste for such people. Do-gooders, she called them. Fools with too much time on their hands.

A continuous pulsating red glow ignited the metal bars of the fence around the palace, cast by the demon tower jutting from the roof of the grand building.

Demon towers were curly black metal structures crowned with Synth jewels to weaken demons and alert us to their presence.

A demon manifesting their true self set the jewel to pulse its red light.

There were many out and proud demons in the encampment who were brave enough to endure the power of the tower to sell their peace cause.

Impressive.

Across the city, many demon towers remained switched on as a symbol of witch dominance, though some had been destroyed, undergoing repairs. And there was a call to turn them all off while talks continued.

It would be a cold day in Hell before the queen agreed to that .

Princess Piper met me at a door on the north side of the central quadrangle, hidden from public view.

I bowed to her. “Your Highness. What’s going on?”

“Hello to you, too.”

“Thought the ‘Highness’ part covered that.”

She frowned at me. “You’re in a bitchy mood.”

I’m in a tea and chill mood, which you’ve shot to shit , I wanted to counter. “Can we get down to it?”

Piper rolled her green eyes and starting walking, dressed in royal red-and-gold informal attire, her brown hair tied in a loose braid. She looked like her mother, her skin an identical shade of bronze, with the same strong facial features. They both sported jawlines to envy.

I followed the princess/secretary/go-between. She was always my first point of contact, the only other person with knowledge of what I did.

The inside of the palace was comprised of purple and silver décor, very lavish, very much a different world of decadence most people would never experience. Piper took me past paintings of royals past and present, the portraits gleaming down on me from silver frames.

I hated it here, especially the permanent smell of the lilies in their vases scattered around the palace.

Lilies reminded me of my grandma, triggering memories of her final breaths.

Just me and her, alone in that room, my prayers for her miraculous recovery lost on the wind while the lilies attacked me with their perfume.

She’d raised me, been there all my life, and then she was gone. I just couldn’t?—

Enough!

We reached the queen’s private quarters in the east wing. Piper knocked on the door, disappearing inside for a moment to announce me.

“In you go,” she said on her return.

“Thank you, Your Highness.”

“Yeah, yeah.”

She was always uncomfortable with formalities.

I swept past her into the opulent bedroom with a four-poster bed and so much comfort. The queen stood by her window in a long black nightdress, not turning to greet me. Her long gray hair sat in a pile atop her head, held by several hair pins.

I bowed anyway. “Your Majesty.”

Queen Margarite glanced at me briefly, revealing a bronze face lined with the harsh slashes of grief since losing her son and husband. Much of her previous self had drained along with them. She’d never been warm, but now she was pure ice. A new woman, one lost to sorrow.

It would have been her husband’s birthday tomorrow.

King Lawrence had taken ill a few months after the death of their eldest son, Prince Wilfred. Details of the king’s death were kept secret, no one but the queen knew his true cause of death. And she made sure to keep it that way.

“Hello, My Shadow,” she said, her voice a little raspy.

“You summoned me, Your Majesty?”

She mostly liked to talk to me in person rather than on the phone.

Her eyes remained on the window. “Look at them out there, thinking they know better than me, trying to destroy the order of things.”

I kept quiet.

“My mother would be turning in her grave at such a sight.” She ran the back of her hand across the net curtains, the scarlet glow of the demon tower spilling into the room.

“I hate what this world has become, Roman. I hate the missed opportunity of a restored Arcana. If only we could go back in time with the knowledge we have of Clay Christmas now, use it to…” She sighed.

“Pardon my foolish words.” She dragged her gaze from the window, pinning it on me with her emerald gaze.

“Thank you for taking care of Mark Shar for me.”

I bowed. “Of course, Your Majesty.”

“However, I am concerned about loose ends.”

“The three men?” I asked.

“Yes. Did they see your face when you killed Mark?”

“Not at all.”

“I thought as much.” She folded her arms across her chest. “You must eradicate them. I will feel better knowing they are dead.”

There was no point being annoyed with her change of mind about Mark’s men. It was her prerogative to switch things up.

“Then I’ll exterminate them, Your Majesty,” I said.

“I am sorry for making you go back out there.” She softened considerably. “I know you must be tired. Yet there is much fear inside me. These three men make me uneasy.” I hated to see her so afraid. But there was no connection to her here, nothing to be worried about.

Her emotions must be all over the place considering what day it was tomorrow.

“I will get it done, Your Majesty.”

Would Keith and the guys still be at the house? Probably not, but I’d check there first.

She offered me a soft yet pained smile. “Thank you, My Shadow. There is a vehicle prepared for you.”

“Right away, Your Majesty.”

“Goodbye. And thank you.”

With that, discussions were over.

Princess Piper handed me the keys to a black car with fake plates waiting in the quadrangle.

“It’s stopped raining,” she said.

“That’s good news,” I answered.

“You should date more,” she added.

“Huh?”

“Think it might warm you up a bit.”

“It’s not my job to be warm, Your Highness.”

She shook her head. “You can have a life outside of this stuff, you know?”

“Not really.”

She shrugged. “You always seem so sad to me.”

Internally, I flinched, giving her nothing on the outside. “I don’t have time to be sad.”

“Because you’re a big tough man?”

“Because I’m busy.”

“Her Majesty’s amazing Shadow couldn’t possibly do anything but brood and kill.”

“I don’t brood.”

“You brood, Roman. You brood hard.”

I opened the car door. “It’s in the job description.”

Piper laughed. “Is that you trying to be funny?”

“Glean from it what you will.”

Another frown. “You sound like a posh lord.”

“Then I should wash my mouth out.”

“Wow. They keep on coming, don’t they?”

“I really have to go,” I said, keeping my face blank.

Dating. Did she not remember the rules? Fucking Keith had been the first time I’d had any action for like two years.

If I found a guy to sleep with I actually liked, then fell for him, got a puppy, shared a cheeky wine on a Friday night before snuggling before the TV, then I’d soften up.

Goodbye hard edges. I wouldn’t want to be out there doing my job.

I’d be loving the man of my dreams, and loving him didn’t serve the queen.

Sometimes I wanted to give my hand and vibrator a break and hit the bars outside my flat. Find some disposable men for some no thrills shagging. Only, thrills were the risk.

I want the thrills…

Piper knew better than to bring dating up with me.

“Goodnight, Your Highness,” I said.

I often got the sense she wanted to be friends. In another life where she wasn’t my boss’s daughter or a princess, maybe we could’ve been. But it wasn’t a good fit.

“Yeah. See you soon.” Off she went without another word.

I got into the vehicle, throwing back two Synth pills for a magical boost.

Synth was designed to replace the loss of the glorious Arcana magic of centuries ago.

Using a blend of blood harvested from compulsory donations by the public every three months and other ingredients, Synth was distributed in pill form, or worked into magical objects like the restricted Synth Orbs.

Nasty things they were, instruments of concentrated Synth magic with the potential for causing a lot of chaos.

Warlocks were cruelly left out of Synth usage when Arcana died, forced to tap into Trace instead—a much weaker magic, the last vestiges of Arcana falling as a snow once a month. Known as Trace Fall, warlocks topped up their magic by standing in that downpour.

Ever since the world-changing incident with that warlock, Clay Christmas, Synth’s potency had taken a hit, the magic changing rapidly.

Certain spells were becoming erratic, breaking easily, or disappearing from our minds altogether. Synth worked by thinking of a spell memorized from the Synth grimoires, or by using attack energy with aggressive flicks of our fingers.

No amount of thinking brought back lost spells, though.

On an assignment last Halloween, I’d cast an invisibility spell on myself, sneaking up on my target. At the last moment, the spell failed, exposing me to the mark and his machete. I still managed to kill him, but hadn’t expected to be dodging his stabs and slices.

Invisibility vanished for good that night.

If I were a warlock, I’d be laughing my head off. They’d been kept out in the cold, treated like shit, often ridiculed for their weaknesses. Now it looked like we might be heading for equal footing, both species drawing on Trace if Synth fell apart.

There were many witches working on a fix. But much like Arcana centuries ago, Synth’s time might be coming to an end.

I liked to think of myself as an enlightened witch. Never looking down on warlocks because that was shitty. No discrimination here in any aspect of life—even in killing. I’d cut the throat of a warlock as I would a witch or anyone else if Her Majesty asked me to.

An equal opportunity murderer.